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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

I got word today that Egalitarian Moments has gone to press. It's completely out of my hands now. But this post isn't so much about EM as it is about another book. One of the other long-time contributors to the blog also has a book coming out, and I don't think he's used this space for shameless self-promotion (yet). So, I'll tell you that Matt McLennan's first book, Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou's Dispute with Lyotardwill also be published by Bloomsbury this fall. Here is the blurb:

Alain Badiou's work in philosophy, though daunting, has gained a receptive
and steadily growing Anglophone readership. What is not well known is
the extent to which Badiou's positions, vis-à-vis ontology, ethics,
politics and the very meaning of philosophy, were hammered out in
dispute with the late Jean-François Lyotard. Matthew R. McLennan's
Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy is the first work to pose the
question of the relation between Lyotard and Badiou, and in so doing
constitutes a significant intervention in the field of contemporary
European philosophy by revisiting one of its most influential and
controversial forefathers.

Badiou himself has underscored the
importance of Lyotard for his own project; might the recent resurgence
of interest in Lyotard be tied in some way to Badiou's comments? Or
deeper still: might not Badiou's philosophical Platonism beg an
encounter with philosophy's other, the figure of the sophist that
Lyotard played so often and so ably? Posing pertinent questions and
opening new discursive channels in the literature on these two major
figures this book is of interest to those studying philosophy, rhetoric,
literary theory, cultural and media studies.

The Notes Taken

The Notes Taken is a collaborative blog dedicated to book reviews and occasional rants. We would like to present an informal venue to discuss and debate recent, and sometimes not so recent, literature in philosophy, politics, and fiction.